Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [134]
They met as old friends. Back in 1997 the two of them had spent countless hours negotiating the postwar relationship between Chechnya and Russia—several agreements that had never materialized, thanks to the second war. Now Rybkin no longer represented the Kremlin, while Zakayev had full credentials from the rebel government. Their meeting was a slap in Putin’s face; it challenged his claim that the rebels were terrorists. Over lunch we drafted a statement: “The two sides should return to the agreement of 12 May 1997 signed by Boris Yeltsin and Aslan Maskhadov.”
Over dessert, we placed calls to the Associated Press and Radio Echo Moscow.
“I am confident that peace is possible. I know how it can be reached,” declared Rybkin. “As soon as I get back to Moscow I will seek a meeting with President Putin to tell him how this can be done.”
“Our side is in full agreement,” added Zakayev. “President Maskhadov is ready for peace. The ball is in the Kremlin’s court.”
Of course Putin refused to meet with Rybkin. The Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers endorsed Rybkin’s initiative, however, and the pressure on the Kremlin increased, from Russian elites and foreign leaders, to stop the war. Rybkin later told me that when he returned to Moscow people of all persuasions, from liberals to Communists to the military, called to congratulate him.
On August 30 it was announced that several Russian politicians, including another former Duma speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and the MP-journalist Yuri Schekochihin, had met with Zakayev in Lichtenstein in the aftermath of the Zurich meeting. Next, none other than former prime minister Primakov, who was still very influential within the intelligence community, came out publicly in support of negotiations with the Chechens.
In early September Rybkin traveled to Tbilisi to meet with Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, who endorsed his peace initiative. The Georgian trip must have particularly irritated the Kremlin: that same week, Putin sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, threatening a military strike on Georgia over the Chechen presence in Pankisi Gorge.
With Boris’s support, Rybkin was planning to run in Russia’s 2004 presidential elections. His peace initiatives were a prelude to his campaign.
On October 23, I shepherded Rybkin in Washington from a meeting with Senator Richard Lugar to a lunch with the former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. En route, we heard shocking news: a gang of Chechens led by Movsar Barayev had taken seven hundred people hostage in a Moscow theater. So much for any hope of peace.
Copenhagen, October 30, 2002: Police arrest Akhmed Zakayev, the envoy of separatist president Aslan Maskhadov, after his arrival in the Danish capital for the opening of the World Chechen Congress. Zakayev is detained under an Interpol warrant filed by Russia, naming him as a suspect in the theater siege of the previous week. A court in Copenhagen remands Zakayev for two weeks, to give the Danish Justice Ministry time to consider the extradition request. On the same day, Russia discloses the nature of the incapacitating gas the FSB had used in the botched rescue mission. It was a secret, non-lethal weapon, an aerosol version of Valium, which was not supposed to kill anyone.
Sasha was certain that the theater siege was another FSB conspiracy aimed at boosting Putin’s war policy and labeling the Maskhadov government as terrorists, “a new version of the apartment house bombings.” When Sasha pronounced his theory I was dismissive. But he offered a spirited argument.
“Look,” he said, “imagine you are an FSB agent named Movsar Barayev.